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PALESTINE -- PEACE NOT APARTHEID

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Chapter 1: PROSPECTS FOR PEACE

One of the major goals of my life, while in political office and since I was retired from the White House by the 1980 election, has been to help ensure a lasting peace for Israelis and others in the Middle East. Many people share the same dream, and at times my own efforts to achieve this goal have been intertwined with some of theirs. It will be good to consider what has brought us to the present situation, the obstacles before us, and some things that can and must be done to bring peace and justice to the region.

No fictional drama could be filled with more excitement, unanticipated happenings, or intriguing characters than this effort to end the ongoing conflict; it is certainly one of the most fascinating and truly important political and military subjects of modern times. The Middle East is perhaps the most volatile region in the world, whose instability is a persistent threat to global peace. It is also the incubator of much of the terrorism that is of such great concern to Americans and citizens of other nations. Although it is not difficult to express the challenges in somewhat simplistic terms, the issues are extremely complex and are derived from both ancient and modern-day political and religious history.

The questions to be considered are almost endless:

What are the prime requisites for peace? What possibilities does the future hold? What common ground already exists on which the contending parties can build a more secure future? Are there better prospects for success from quiescent diplomatic efforts or from bold and public pressure for negotiations? Can there be a stable peace that perpetuates the present circumstances? Must the situation steadily deteriorate until another crisis causes the interested parties to act? Even with full American backing, can Israel's enormous military power prevail over militant Arabs?

Most chilling of all, could the festering differences precipitate a military confrontation involving the use of nuclear weapons? It is known that Israel has a major nuclear arsenal and the capability to launch weapons quickly, and some neighboring states are believed to be attempting to acquire their own atomic bombs. Without progress toward peace, desperation or adventurism on either side could precipitate such a confrontation.

There are growing schisms in the Middle East region, with hardening Arab animosity toward the Israeli-United States alliance. The war in Iraq has dramatized the conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and has strengthened the influence of Iran. Militant Arabs, including Hamas and Hezbollah, have been given new life and influence as they are seen to be struggling against Israeli occupation of Palestine. The absence of any viable peace initiative exacerbates each individual controversy.

In times of greatest discouragement, ultimate hope has rested on the fact that, overwhelmingly, the people in the region -- even those Syrians, Israelis, Lebanese, and Palestinians who are most distrusted by their adversaries -- want the peace efforts to succeed. The rhetoric and demands from all sides may be harsh, but there are obvious areas of agreement that can provide a basis for progress. Private discussions with Arab leaders are much more promising than their public statements would lead one to believe, and in Israel there is a strong and persistent constituency for moderation that is too little heard or appreciated in neighboring states or in America.

Continuing impediments have been the desire of some Israelis for Palestinian land, the refusal of some Arabs to accept Israel as a neighbor, the absence of a clear and authoritative Palestinian voice acceptable to Israel, the refusal of both sides to join peace talks without onerous preconditions, the rise in Islamic fundamentalism, and the recent lack of any protracted effort by the United States to pursue peace based on international law and previous agreements ratified by Israel.

In spite of the obvious need to resolve differences, the peace effort does not have a life of its own; it is not self-sustaining. The United States will always be preoccupied with Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or other strategic responsibilities, and there are competing factors that distract Arab leaders who heretofore had been more inclined to focus on peace with Israel and a just solution to the Palestinian question. Many Arab regimes have become increasingly preoccupied with domestic problems, which include resurgent religious identity, rising expectations among more literate constituencies and the emerging middle classes, a fear of further intrusion by external forces, and stirrings of democracy. There is a tendency for these regimes to free themselves from their Palestinian burden.

The situation is obviously not encouraging, but neither is it hopeless if leaders can remember the progress already made and build on past negotiated agreements. Most Arab regimes have accepted the permanent existence of Israel as an indisputable fact and are no longer calling for an end to the State of Israel, having contrived a common statement at an Arab summit in 2002 that offers peace and normal relations with Israel within its acknowledged international borders and in compliance with other U.N. Security Council resolutions. Almost everyone has accepted the ultimate right of the Palestinian people to decide their own sovereign destiny in a climate of peace.

There is no place for sustained violence, which tends to subvert peace initiatives and perpetuate hatred and combat. Some Palestinians have responded to political and military occupation by launching terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, a course of action that is both morally reprehensible and politically counterproductive. These dastardly acts have brought widespread condemnation and discredit on the entire Palestinian community -- and are almost suicidal for the Palestinian cause. It has been encouraging to observe an almost complete absence of violence during those all-too-brief intervals when the prospects for peace and justice gave the people hope. This was evident, for instance, during the time of the Camp David Accords in 1978, and when the Palestinians were welcomed to the Madrid conference in 1991, as well as during the several Palestinian elections.

It has always been clear that the antagonists cannot be expected to take the initiative to resolve their own differences. Hatred and distrust in the Middle East are too ingrained and pride is too great for any of the disputing parties to offer invitations or concessions that they know will almost inevitably be rejected. Accommodation must be sought through negotiation with all parties to the dispute, with each having fair representation and the right to participate in free discussions. Compromise is necessary from both sides, with clear distinctions made between what their dreams and ideology dictate and what is pragmatically possible. Although some extremists disagree, most Israelis have learned that they cannot reconstruct the Kingdom of David, which includes all of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and parts of Lebanon and Jordan. At the same time, most Palestinians have been forced to accept the fact that the nation of Israel will never be erased from the map. Neither side can predict or impose on others the ultimate outcome of negotiations, and any final agreement has to be both voluntary and acceptable to both sides.

Strong support for peace talks must come from the United States, preferably involving representatives of the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia. Until recently, America's leaders were known and expected to exert maximum influence in an objective, nonbiased way to achieve peace in the Middle East. In order to resume this vital role, the United States must be a trusted participant, evenhanded, consistent, unwavering, and enthusiastic -- a partner with both sides and not a judge of either. Although it is inevitable that at times there will be a tilt one way or the other, in the long run the role of honest broker must once again be played by Washington.

"When a promising negotiation evolves, the United States will have to join other wealthy nations in offering the political and economic incentives necessary to bolster what will be at first a fragile understanding and then be prepared to help the peacemakers fend off the radicals and extremists who will seek to subvert what is being carefully created and nurtured.

The three most basic premises are quite clear:

1. Israel's right to exist within recognized borders -- and to live in peace -- must be accepted by Palestinians and all other neighbors;

2. The killing of noncombatants in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon by bombs, missile attacks, assassinations, or other acts of violence cannot be condoned; and

3. Palestinians must live in peace and dignity in their own land as specified by international law unless modified by good-faith negotiations with Israel.

The recent outbreak of violence in Gaza and between Israel and Lebanon is vivid proof of the need for a comprehensive peace agreement. The United States stands almost alone in its undeviating backing of Israel, while Arab support for militant groups approaches unanimity as violence continues. People of most other nations strongly condemn the excessive destruction and civilian casualties by Israel as they deplore the deliberate provocation of Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.

BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES

A window into the London state-sponsored synthetic terror milieu came in December 2001, when British authorities were forced to arrest and question Mark Yates, a self-styled security expert who ran a firearms training camp in Alabama. Yates was suspected of helping Islamic terrorist patsies from Britain who were to hone their marksmanship skills on American soil before going off to fight for Islamic causes around the globe. Yates, a British bodyguard and firearms trainer who had operations in both the United Kingdom and the United States, allegedly offered "live fire" weapons training in America for aspiring holy warriors. British police thought that Yates was involved on the US end of the "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" training program offered on the London market by the Sakina Security Services company, owned by Suleiman Bilal Zain-ul-abidin. Yates, who was also the operations and training director at the Ground Zero firearms training camp outside Marion, Alabama, denied everything. "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" included instruction in "art of bone breaking," and learning to "improvise explosive devices." British Moslems would be given the opportunity to squeeze off up to 3,000 rounds at a shooting range in the United States before heading off to fight for Islamic causes around the world. "All serious firearms training must be done overseas" because of British gun laws, advertising for the course noted. British prosecutors said their investigators had searched Zain-ul-abidin's apartment and seized documents believed to be related to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, anti-Semitic material and what appeared to be disabled firearms, including a rifle and two handguns. The Sunday Telegraph reported about another military training course, this time at a secret camp near the village of Yetgoch in southern Wales. Young Moslems and others learned how to use Uzi machine guns at the camp, which was run by Trans Global Security International.

The reports of the Welsh training camp rekindled a debate in Britain over how the UK had become a hotbed for military recruitment by radical Islamic elements. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a firebrand Islamic leader in London, founder of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun organization, and Bin Laden's sometime spokesman, said in 2000 that between 1,800 and 2,000 British Moslems were going abroad each year for military training. "We find young men in university classes or mosques, invite them for a meal and discuss "ongoing attacks being suffered by Moslems in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir," Bakri Mohammed said. "We ... make them understand their duty to support the jihad (holy war) struggle verbally, financially and, if they can, physically in order to liberate their homeland." Bakri's al-Muhajiroun group, like al Qaeda, advocated wiping out the world's 50-plus existing Moslem-majority states and replacing them with a single "khilafah" (caliphate), or Islamic state. (Sunday Telegraph, MSNBC, December 27, 2001)

Satellite phone records of a phone used by Osama bin Laden during 1996-98, revealed that "Britain was at the heart of the terrorist's planning for his worldwide campaign of murder and destruction," according to the London Sunday Times. Bin Laden and his most senior aides made more calls to Britain than to any other country; they made more than 260 calls from Afghanistan to 27 numbers in Britain. According to documents from the trial of the US east African embassy bombings, the telephone was bought in 1996 with the help of Dr Sa ad al Fagih, 45, the head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Al Fagih had been regularly used by the BBC as an expert on Bin Laden. His credit card was also used to buy more than 3,000 minutes of pre-paid airtime. The records showed calls to ten other countries, the next most frequent after the UK being Yemen. There were no calls to Iraq. (London Sunday Times, March 24, 2002)

AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN

The role of London as the leading center of Islamic radicalism has been an open secret for years, but has never been reported by the US controlled corporate media. In the nineteenth century, when Mazzini and Marx operated out of London, the slogan was that "England supports all revolutions but her own." In the post-colonial world, the British have found it to their advantage to encourage violent movements which could be used for destabilizations and assassinations in the former colonies, which their ex-masters did not want to see become strong and effective modern states. Between 1995 and 1999, protests were lodged by many countries concerning the willingness of the British government to permit terror groups to operate from British territory. Among the protestors were: Israel, Algeria, Turkey, Libya, Yemen, India, Egypt, France, Peru, Germany, Nigeria, and Russia. This is a list which, if widely known, might force certain US radio commentators to change their world picture about who is soft on terrorism.

A number of groups which were cited as terrorist organizations by the US State Department had their headquarters in London. Among them were the Islamic Group of Egypt, led by Bin Laden's current right-hand man, Zawahiri, who was a known participant in the plot to assassinate Egyptian President Sadat; this was also the group which had murdered foreign tourists at Luxor in an attempt to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry. Also present in London were Al Jihad of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of Algeria (responsible for large-scale massacres in that country), the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which attacked targets in Turkey, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka, who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Sheikh Bakri, Bin Laden spokesman's spokesman, was openly active in London into mid-1998 and later; he gave a press conference after the bombings of the US East African embassies. The killings of figures like Sadat and Rajiv Ghandi should indicate the scale of the destabilization in developing countries of which some of these groups are capable.

Non-Anglo-Saxon press organs have from time to time pointed up the role of London in worldwide subversion. "The track of ... the GIA leader in Paris leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists," wrote Le Figaro on Nov. 3, 1995, in the wake of a murderous terror attack carried out in France. A report by the French National Assembly in October 2001 alleged that London played the key role as clearinghouse for money laundering of criminal and terrorist organizations. On March 3, 1996: Hamas bombed a market in Jerusalem, leaving 12 Israelis dead. A British newspaper reported soon after: "Israeli security sources say the fanatics ... are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here ... Military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations." (Daily Express, London, March 5, 1996)

In the midst of a campaign of destabilization against Egypt in the mid-1990s, the semi-official organ of the Egyptian government pointed out that "Britain has become the number one base in the world for international terrorism." (Al Ahram, Cairo, September 7, 1996) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak noted that "... some states, like Britain, give political asylum to terrorists, and these states will pay the price for that." (Al-Hayat, September 18, 1996) British newspapers were also alarmed by the level of lslamic extremist activity they saw around them. By the late 1990s, there were so many Islamic extremists in London that the city had acquired the nickname of "Londonistan." The leading right-wing paper in the UK wrote: "Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale ... and the capital is home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals." (London Daily Telegraph, November 20, 1999) President Putin of Russia saw a direct link between the London Islamic scene and terrorism in his own country. He said in an interview with a German news magazine: "In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today -- not officially, but effectively in the open -- they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan." (Focus, September 2001)

Brixton Mosque was one of the notorious centers for terrorist recruitment in the heart of London. This was the home base of Zacharias Mousawi, the French citizen put on trial in Alexandria, Va. It was also the home of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Imam Qureshi of Brixton and others were allowed by the British authorities to preach anti-US sermons to the some 4,000 Moslem inmates in British prisons, and thus to recruit new patsies for the world-wide terror machine. According to Bakri, Bin Laden's spokesman, during the late 1990s 2,000 fighters were trained yearly, including many in the US because of the lax firearms legislation. The rival of Brixton Mosque was the equally redoubtable Finsbury Mosque, the home of the Saudi demagogue al Masri, who was finally taken into custody in the spring of 2004. There is every reason to believe that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene.

-- 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley

 

As detailed by Ben Barber, The Washington Times, 5/7/2002, "The Saudi government gave $135 million in 16 months to fund terrorism. The money goes to a list of 13 charities, and seven of them fund Hamas," which the State Department lists as a terrorist organization. As detailed in The Washington Times, 8/24/2002, another Saudi charity, Al-Haramain also uses "its funds to finance terrorism."

-- America Betrayed, by Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D.

In the final analysis, the different peoples of the Middle East have their own viewpoints, their own grievances, their own goals and aspirations. But it is Israel that remains the key, the tiny vortex around which swirl the winds of hatred, intolerance, and bloodshed. The indomitable people of Israel are still attempting to define their future, the basic character of their nation, its geographical boundaries, and conditions under which the legitimate rights of the Palestinians can be honored and an accommodation forged with its neighbors. These internal decisions will have to be made in consultation with Arabs who are basically antagonistic -- perhaps as difficult a political prospect as history has ever seen. Many Israelis, like their neighbors, are eagerly seeking a measure of normalized existence, but the verbal threats from Iran and some radical Arabs and the terrorist attacks in the occupied territories and even within Israel have kept alive the feelings of distrust and alienation among Israelis toward their neighbors. The most extreme and obnoxious statements have come from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has described the Holocaust as "a myth" and urged that Israel be annihilated or moved from the Middle East to Europe.

The Arabs must recognize the reality that is Israel, just as the Israelis must accept a Palestinian state in the small remaining portion of territorial homeland allotted to the Palestinians by the United Nations and previous peace agreements. Palestinian human rights must be protected as generally recognized under international law, including self-determination, free speech, equal treatment of all persons, freedom from prolonged military domination and imprisonment without trial, the right of families to be reunited, the sanctity of ownership of property, and the right of non-belligerent people to live in peace.

The Bible says that when the first blood was shed among His children, God asked Cain, the slayer, "Where is Abel thy brother?" And he said, "I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?" And the Lord said, "What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed ..." (Genesis 4:9-11). The blood of Abraham, [1] God's father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God -- an anguished cry for peace.

It will be seen that there is a formula for peace with justice in this small and unique portion of the world. It is compatible with international law and sustained American government policy, has the approval of most Israelis and Palestinians, and conforms to agreements previously consummated -- but later renounced. It is this blueprint that we will now explore.

________________

Notes:

1. I used this phrase as the title of my earlier book about the Middle East, The Blood of Abraham (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985; repr. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1993).

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